This week nations meet at the United Nations to discuss lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS), including robotic weapons that might hunt for targets on their own. It has been 18 months since meetings were last held. This year’s discussions, the fourth since 2014, mark the first time talks will be held as a Group of Governmental Experts (GGE), a more formal discussion format than earlier talks. While the shift to a more formal format might seem like progress toward reaching an international consensus on what to do about autonomous weapons, the reality is that the pace of diplomacy continues to fall far behind the speed of technological advancement. Those advancements include major capabilities but also newly discovered limits in autonomy and artificial intelligence.

When nations first began discussing autonomous weapons in 2014, the issue was fairly forward-leaning. Lethal robotic weapons seemed like a distant future problem (even though simple versions had been used in limited ways for decades). In the years since, however, the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning has grown by leaps and bounds. Powered by advances in big data, computer processing power, and improvements in algorithms, AI-enabled systems are now beginning to tackle many problems that have been intractable for decades. AI systems have beaten humans at poker and the Chinese strategy game Go, including most recently reaching super-human level play at Go in a mere three days of self-practice with no human training data. AI systems can translatelanguages and transcribe speech. Self-driving cars are taking to the roads. Nation-states have deployed armies of Twitter bots to push propaganda. AI is being applied to medicine, finance, media, and many other industries. Our lives are increasingly influenced by algorithms. What might have seemed like science fiction when nations began talks only a few years ago is fast becoming the everyday.